NC police re-victimize abused teen girl, steal money meant for her | Opinion

The Mint Hill Police Department stole $69,130 from a 17-year-old sexual abuse victim. To be fair, though, they gave the feds a cut before using the rest to buy generators.

A judge ordered the $69,130 cops found in the home of the man who had abused the girl since she was 5 years old to be given to her. But the judge didn’t know the money had already been stolen. Mint Hill had taken it under the guise of “civil asset forfeiture.” The man, Mario Alberto Gomez-Saldana II, had drug paraphernalia. They claimed the cash could have been connected to a major drug operation – even though Saldana II had won the lottery, netting about $70,000 after taxes.

They’ll tell you “civil asset forfeiture” is a necessary crimefighting tool, one they’ve used several times, to the tune of nearly $900,000 over the past five years. According to the Institute for Justice, police departments in North Carolina stole (my word) nearly $300 million between 2000 and 2019.

We know this because that’s what Scott MacLatchie, an attorney for Mint Hill, told WCNC Charlotte, the investigative unit that exposed this crime.

“I am looking at this through, what you have to understand, through kind of what I would call a sterile lens,” MacLatchie told WCNC. “I am at peace that we followed the law.”

North Carolina, to its credit, passed legislation to make it more difficult for police to engage in this type of theft. The state is one of four that requires a criminal conviction before allowing forfeiture. What a novel idea, that the state must prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt before punishing you.

I use the word theft purposefully, because there’s no other honest way to describe. Under previous “civil asset forfeiture” laws, police could take your money in North Carolina without even charging you with a crime, so long as they could claim it maybe-kind-of-sort-of might be related to some unproven criminal activity. It made a mockery of the supposed American legal principle of innocence until proven guilty. Police could take your money and there was little you could do about it, even if you did nothing wrong.

Sometimes residents’ money was taken literally at gunpoint after heavily-armed men broke into their homes, and they had little chance of having it returned. I call that theft – because that’s what it is. Calling it anything else is propaganda.

Despite the change in North Carolina law, Mint Hill and other departments have been using a loophole. They simply partner with the Justice Department through a program called “equitable sharing” and steal money that way, keeping upwards of 80 percent.

That’s why MacLatchie was right in one respect. Mint Hill “followed the law” when it stole $69,130 a judge said should go to a young victim of sexual abuse.

But no law enforcement official should be at peace with this kind of obvious injustice – inflicted by the very people trained and paid to make the public feel safe. And yet, law enforcement officials throughout the country claim if they can no longer steal money, criminal organizations would grow richer and more powerful, that it would hand drug cartels “a win.”

Researchers for the Institute for Justice studied those claims. After examining five years of data after New Mexico banned “civil asset forfeiture,” they found that “the predicted rise in crime and drop in arrests” did not materialize.

Who could have predicted that allowing police to commit crimes in the name of fighting crime was not an effective way to prevent crime?

Congress is considering putting an end to the loophole. It should. It must.

Gomez-Saldana II is in prison, being held to account for what he did.

But his victim, a teenage girl who had to survive horrific acts, is still denied money rightfully hers because Mint Hill police are at peace that they were able to steal it from her legally.

They should be ashamed. It’s a shame that they aren’t.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.